Careful what you wish for

It its quest to eliminate diversity in America, the Trump Administration is demanding admissions data from colleges and universities to hunt for evidence of discrimination against white kids and kids from red states. In fact, there’s a history of affirmative action for white kids in admissions that goes back a century:

In the early 20th century, Harvard and other Ivy League schools saw an increase in the enrollment of Jewish immigrant students. To address these changing demographics, Harvard's President, Lawrence Lowell, proposed limiting the number of Jewish students. Harvard introduced policies like legacy preferences, favoring applicants with family connections to alumni in an attempt to limit Jewish enrollment and maintain a predominantly white, Protestant student body. The practice of using legacy admissions to restrict Jewish students spread to other Ivy League schools.

We’ve been here before. If university admissions are blind to ethnicity and rely only on grades and test scores, we know what will happen: the vast majority of kids going to elite colleges and universities will be Jewish or Asian, and a large proportion will be female. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Trump and MAGA are planning.

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